Search results matching tag 'atlanta'

SQL Saturday #220 (Atlanta): Demos

Adam Machanic — Sat, 18 May 2013 18:33:00 GMT

Today at SQL Saturday #220 in Atlanta I presented a new brand new session, "SQL Server Query Plan Analysis: The 5 Culprits That Cause 95% of Your Performance Headaches."

This session is designed to help people quickly analyze query plans and find likely culprits without being query tuning experts; I find that in a huge number of cases the root cause of problems is one of just a few potential situations.

Thanks to everyone who joined me today for the deliveries! In addition to it being a new session this was also the first time that I've ever been asked to present the same session twice in a single day. So it was quite an experience.

The demo script is attached. As always, let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Enjoy!

More Fun in Atlanta: Parallelism at SQL Saturday 220

Adam Machanic — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:25:00 GMT

May 18, SQL Saturday returns yet again to the Atlanta area. At this point I've become a bit of a regular at Atlanta's events; this will be my third one in a row. The team that puts them together is amazing, and produces top quality, super fun and educational days every time. Plus: Taco Mac.

Friday, May 17, the event is running a few pre-conference seminars, and I'll be delivering one focused on parallelism in SQL Server. This is an updated version of the seminar I delivered at the 2010 PASS conference; you can read Kendra Little's review of that day on her personal blog, littlekendra.com.

To get full information on the Atlanta seminar, visit the EventBrite page for the event: http://surfmulticore.eventbrite.com/

Any questions? Let me know in the comment section.

Hope to see you there!

Itzik Ben-Gan in Atlanta: May 13-17

Adam Machanic — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 21:10:00 GMT

This year Data Education is offering a few more classes with Itzik Ben-Gan, the world's foremost T-SQL instructor.

Our first offering has just been announced: Atlanta, May 13-17.

Neither Itzik nor his class needs much introduction, but click through for a full outline and other details.

We think that Atlanta is a great city, with an amazingly vibrant SQL Server community. Hope you'll be able to join us there!

By the way: if you're joining the class stick around town for a SQL Saturday event that is taking place, coincidentally, on May 18.

SQL Saturday 89 - Atlanta GA - Materials

Adam Machanic — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:57:00 GMT

Last Saturday, September 17, I was lucky to be able to present two sessions at an excellent SQL Saturday in the Atlanta area. The day drew a large crowd and had a great speaker lineup. All in all, a huge success, and a very well-managed event. Congratulations to the organizers!

One of the highlights for me, aside from speaking, was helping out with logistics the night before and creating a cocktail for the event. Check out Audrey Hammonds's blog for details.

My two sessions were:

"SQL Server Parallelism and Performance"
Over the past five years, multi-core processors have made the jump from semi-obscure to commonplace in the data center. Today we regularly expect to see 16, 32, or 64 cores in even our lower-end servers. Are you getting everything you can out of the wealth of processing power at your disposal? Attend this session to take a detailed look at how and why SQL Server processes queries in parallel, as well as methods for controlling parallel processing via configuration options, the Resource Governor, and query-level hints. This session will enable you to immediately evaluate, understand, and improve the state of parallel processing on your servers.

and

"15 Powerful SQL Server Dynamic Management Objects"
The Dynamic Management Objects--a set of views and functions that first shipped with SQL Server 2005--are a window into the inner workings of your SQL Server instance. Locked within is the data you need to help solve virtually any performance problem, quickly debug issues, and gain insight into what's actually happening on your server, right now. This session is a fast-paced tour of the ins, outs, whys, hows, and even pitfalls of 15 of the most important views and functions--information gleaned from heavy use of the objects in a number of environments. You will learn how to understand transaction behavior, locking, wait statistics, sessions, requests, and much more. Attend this session and you will be the master of your SQL Server instance.

I promised to share the slides and demos from the second session, and those are attached to this post.

Many thanks to everyone who attended my sessions and for all of the positive feedback I received! (I would also thank anyone who gave me negative feedback, but in this case the worst I received was that I had a typo on one of my slides.) I had a great time, and hope to return to Atlanta again sometime soon.

Where Can You Find Me the Rest of This Year?

Adam Machanic — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:28:00 GMT

Autumn is creeping inevitably closer here in the US, and that means that speaking season is about to kick into high gear. Here's my current schedule for the remainder of the year:

September 8, 17:00 GMT (online) - 24 Hours of PASS webcast: "Baseline Basics or: Who Broke the Database?"

In this session, excerpted from my PASS Summit precon, I'll explain the whys and hows of using baselines to assist with performance tuning. If you find yourself more often than not tuning reactively rather than proactively, this session is for you. This is a free webcast, so why not join in?

September 8, 18:30 EDT (Waltham, MA) - New England SQL Server Users Group: "Windowing Functions in SQL Server 2008, Denali, and Beyond"

Two in one day! This session will kick off the 2011/2012 New England SQL Server season, and will cover what are (in my ever-so-humble opinion) the most important T-SQL enhancements in the past three versions of SQL Server: windowing function enhancements. I'll discuss what's there in today's shipping versions, and the new and incredibly powerful functionality that Denali brings to the table. If you're in the Boston area, don't miss it!

September 17 (Atlanta, GA) - SQL Saturday #89: (Two Talks)

After the great time I had at this year's TechEd show in Atlanta I could hardly wait to get back. Luckily, the fantastic SQL Server community in the Atlanta area scheduled this event, which gave me the perfect excuse to pack my bags for a return trip. The speaker lineup for this event is rock-solid, and I'll be contributing with two talks: my introductory dive into SQL Server parallelism, and an overview of my 15 favorite activity monitoring dynamic management objects. This should be a great event by anyone's standards, and it's free, so if you live nearby you have literally no excuse not to attend.

October 11, 08:30 PDT (Seattle, WA) - PASS Community Summit Pre-Conference Seminar: No More Guessing! An Enlightened Approach to Performance Troubleshooting

No more guessing! It's not just a catchphrase; it's a way of life. When faced with performance problems we have a choice: we can either run around panicking, wasting everyone's time (including our own), or we can use the huge amount of information at our disposal to figure out what's actually wrong and fix it. As the calm and collected type, I prefer the second option, and so should you. If you'll be attending the PASS conference, join me on Tuesday to learn how you, too, can quickly and accurately pinpoint the root cause of your performance issues.

October 12-14 (Seattle, WA) - PASS Community Summit Spotlight Session: Query Tuning Mastery: Zen and the Art of Workspace Memory

Your query is running, and it needs to sort some data. Or to hash some data. Or to perform a parallel operation. These things take memory, and as any SQL Server professional knows, in the world of SQL Server memory is worth much, much more than its weight in gold (even given today's hugely-inflated prices). Attend this session to learn the ins and outs of workspace memory: what it is, why it's needed, where the memory comes from, and most importantly, how to control it to make certain queries faster and other queries not have to wait as long. Workspace memory tuning is a mostly untapped performance opportunity that many DBAs can heavily benefit from learning how to leverage.

November 1-3 (Las Vegas, NV) - SQL Server Connections: (Three Talks)

My final speaking engagement of the year will be at the always-fun SQL Server Connections show in Vegas. (It's in Vegas! How could it not be fun?!) I'll be doing three talks during the course of the show: An introductory talk on my favorite topic the past couple of years, parallelism in SQL Server; a much more advanced parallelism talk to build on that one; and a talk on the various dynamic management objects that can be used in the quest for ultimate SQL Server performance. Save a spot for me at the poker table!

I'm really looking forward to these events. If you're going to be there let me know in the comments, and/or feel free to find me at any of the shows and say hi. (Buying me a drink or two wouldn't hurt either.) See you there!